December 29, 2013

As the default Gnome Nautilus file manager gets slimed down for tablets, the need for a traditional file manager is becoming more important. This is why Nemo was forked and developed.

Nemo, the default Cinnamon file
manager, needs Cinnamon to be installed, even if you want to use it in
some other desktop environment such as GNOME/Unity. That's not the only
issue that makes using the latest Nemo under Unity difficult - Cinnamon
2.0 breaks Unity in Ubuntu 13.10, Nemo no longer draws the desktop icons
and so on.

I wanted to use the latest Nemo under Unity, but without Cinnamon dependencies so I used the Nautilus Unity patches modified for Nemo by Jacob Zimmermann, which I updated to work with the latest Nemo 2.0.3, and I also added some extra patches to remove the Cinnamon dependencies (except for cinnamon-translations but that shouldn't be an issue), re-enable Nemo to handle the desktop icons and allow Nemo to use GNOME Control Center to change the desktop background or set a picture as wallpaper via context menu.

Since some of you might want to use this modified Nemo in Unity, I uploaded
it along with its extensions to a PPA, so you can easily install and
use it under Unity (Ubuntu 14.04, 13.10, 13.04, 12.10 and 12.04).

With these changes, you can completely replace Nautilus with Nemo in Unity, without having to install Cinnamon. Why use Nemo? Well, Nemo comes with a huge number of features that no longer exist in Nautilus as well as some new ones:

Extra Pane feature (can be enabled via View menu or using the F3 key) as well as an option to always start in split-pane mode;

All these extensions are available in
the Nemo WebUpd8 PPA. One extension is missing though: Sushi (a port of
the GNOME Sushi extension to Nemo), because I didn't have time to remove
its Cinnamon dependencies.

Install Nemo file manager in Ubuntu (Unity)

Warning: do not use this PPA if you're using Linux Mint or you've installed Cinnamon from the stable or nightly PPAs!
Also, if you've added one of these two PPAs, remove it before using the
WebUpd8 Nemo PPA even if you didn't install Cinnamon, or else the Nemo
version in the WebUpd8 Nemo PPA might be overwritten.

1. Install Nemo

The WebUpd8 Nemo PPA is available for Ubuntu 14.04, 13.10, 13.04, 12.10 and 12.04.
Add the PPA and install the latest Nemo (version 2.0.3 at the time I'm
writing this post) with Unity tweaks/fixes by using the commands below:

To
launch Nemo, search for "Nemo" in Dash - no application called "Nemo"
will show up but instead an application called files should be displayed
- that's the app you need to launch. Don't search for "Files" because
that will also find Nautilus (which is also called "Files").

2. Optional: install Nemo extensions

To install all the Nemo extensions (remove the extensions you don't want to use from the command below!) use the following command: